Setting up my infrastructure – Part 6: The evaluation candidates

In this post I want to introduce the evaluation candidates for the bug tracker and the continuous integration software I’m going to use for my pet project.

Since I want to spent not too much time on my infrastructure, I just want to check out two or three candidates for each, and I already have a list of bug trackers I’m definitely not going to use, so I start with them first. Also, the Wikipedia comparison sheet of issue tracking systems is a good reference to exclude some applications. I’m going to start from the side of the bug tracker and from that I make an inner join on the available CI servers with integration possibility as the join condition.

My filters

Again my little disclaimer: This is my personal list of filters for my personal pet project. They may or may not apply to your use case or requirement catalog.

First of all, I want to host the solution myself and not depend on someone else’s infrastructure. Then as the next thing I already mentioned I want at least a minimum integration of bug tracker and CI server, so anything that totally does not know from each other is not in my scope, as well as tools that don’t integrate with any CI server solution.

You already know that I use a Windows Server for hosting, and I don’t want to mess around too much with my IIS, so I’d like to stick with solutions that are either ASP.NET or PHP applications, or that are not hosted in the IIS directly. Besides that I don’t want to manually administer an extra apache on a system. I don’t know enough of that and I don’t want to spent my time learning how to manage another web server when I already know how to manage my IIS and administering web servers is not my main business. I’d rather spent my time learning more about things that really push my skills forward and making me more specialized.

When thinking about the database, I want to use either MySQL/MariaDB or Microsoft SQL Server Express. I know how to manage both as well as Oracle (which I don’t want to set up and keep it running myself without the help of an experienced Oracle DBA), and learning setting up and running yet another database is not on my to-do list for now.

Those restrictions already strike out a lot of possible systems, and the next one will make the list even shorter: I don’t want to use something that is not commercially maintained. There are several reasons for that. If there’s a bug that itches me, I don’t want to hope that the community is going to fix it. In several open source projects the normal answer to a bug report is “where’s the pull request for the fix?”. I don’t want to dig into the code of my bug tracker to fix issues myself. I’m willing to pay for my tooling even if I try to keep expenses low.

This is the last filter: The software should be affordable for a one person show and scale up to a small team of about 5 until it gets more expensive.

The candidates

After applying my filters to the list of available bug trackers, only a few are left over. They are only commercial solutions where I can rely on support. Then I additionally filtered a bit more for products from companies where I have a feeling that they are well-known in the developer communities so I can additionally rely on fast help via StackExchange.

First of all, something what I tested some time ago and is indeed a good software for keeping track of your project and your to-dos is FogBugz, but the self-hosted edition is too expensive for me (the entry point is a 5 user licence at 999 USD).

As I already use a lot of stuff from Atlassian, it would be logical to check out their solution too. This would be Jira. It is the same 10 USD for 10 User entry point and integrates with Stash, FishEye and Crucible. That would make it a first class citizen in my current environment. They also have a build server, Bamboo, that would fit in nicely too. So Jira and Bamboo are my first candidates for the evaluation.

Besides that I already use tooling from JetBrains (ReSharper, DotPeek), and they also offer a bug tracking tool called YouTrack and a build server named TeamCity. For both tools JetBrains offer free licences that restrict either the number of possible users or build configurations. So with 10 users and my single project I would be in the free licence area for both, and upgrades are affordable for larger teams starting at 450€ for a 10-user YouTrack licence and 25 users is a mere 225€ upgrade. TeamCity upgrade is more expensive, but it is also possible and allowed to set up more than one free TeamCity instance if it really would be necessary. This seems a good pack and so they are in the evaluation.

So far I am very happy with SoureTree, ReSharper and DotPeek and I have a feeling that both companies can deliver a decent bug tracking and continuous integration software for my needs. That’s why I chose to stop with picking candidates at this point. Evaluating four products is a not so trivial task already and if both products in a category would fail, then I still can choose other candidates to check.